Our testing methods
Before dipping into pages of benchmark graphs, let's set the stage with a quick look at other the players we've assembled for comparative reference. We've called up a wide range of competitors, including a selection of desktop hard drives, traditional notebook drives, Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid, and a stack of pure solid-state goodness. Below is a chart highlighting some of the key attributes of the contenders we've lined up to face our quartet of 7,200-RPM notebook drives.

Flash controller

Interface speed

Spindle speed

Cache size

Platter capacity

Total capacity

Corsair Force F100

SandForce SF-1200

3Gbps

NA

NA

NA

100GB

Corsair Force F120

SandForce SF-1200

3Gbps

NA

NA

NA

120GB

Corsair Nova V128

Indilinx Barefoot ECO

3Gbps

NA

64MB

NA

128GB

Crucial RealSSD C300

Marvell 88SS9174

6Gbps

NA

256MB

NA

256GB

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

32MB

500GB

1TB

Hitachi Travelstar 7K500

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

16MB

250GB

500GB

Intel X25-M G2

Intel PC29AS21BA0

3Gbps

NA

32MB

NA

160GB

Intel X25-V

Intel PC29AS21BA0

3Gbps

NA

32MB

NA

40GB

Kingston SSDNow V+

Toshiba T6UG1XBG

3Gbps

NA

128MB

NA

128GB

OCZ Agility 2

SandForce SF-1200

3Gbps

NA

NA

NA

100GB

OCZ Vertex 2

SandForce SF-1200

3Gbps

NA

NA

NA

100GB

Plextor PX-128M1S

Marvell 88SSE8014

3Gbps

NA

128MB

NA

128GB

Samsung Spinpoint F3

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

32MB

500GB

1TB

Samsung Spinpoint MP4

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

16MB

320GB

640GB

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

32MB

500GB

1TB

Seagate Barracuda LP

NA

3Gbps

5,900 RPM

32MB

500GB

2TB

Seagate Barracuda XT

NA

6Gbps

7,200 RPM

64MB

500GB

2TB

Seagate Momentus 7200.4

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

16MB

250GB

500GB

Seagate Momentus 750GB

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

16MB

375GB

750GB

Seagate Momentus XT

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

32MB

250GB

500GB

WD Caviar Black 1TB

NA

6Gbps

7,200 RPM

64MB

500GB

1TB

WD Caviar Black 2TB

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

64MB

500GB

2TB

WD Caviar Green 2TB

NA

3Gbps

5,400 RPM

32MB

500GB

2TB

WD Caviar Green 3TB

NA

3Gbps

5,400 RPM

64MB

750GB

3TB

WD Scorpio Black 320GB

NA

3Gbps

NA

16MB

160GB

320GB

WD Scorpio Black 500GB

NA

3Gbps

7,200 RPM

16MB

250GB

500GB

WD Scorpio Blue

NA

3Gbps

5,400 RPM

8MB

375GB

750GB

WD SiliconEdge Blue

JMicron JMF612

3Gbps

NA

64MB

NA

256GB

WD VelociRaptor VR150M

NA

3Gbps

10,000 RPM

16MB

150GB

300GB

WD VelociRaptor VR200M

NA

3Gbps

10,000 RPM

32MB

200GB

600GB

Although performance results for the 3.5" drives aren't entirely relevant to our focus on notebook models, they do provide a handy point of reference for desktop users. Despite much higher prices, SSDs share the same 2.5" form factor as mechanical notebook drives. Like it or not, they're direct competition.

On the SSD front, we've collected all the other relevant players, including drives based on Indilinx, Intel, JMicron, Marvell, SandForce, and Toshiba controllers. Although it might not seem like a fair fight, we've also thrown in results for a striped RAID 0 array built using a pair of Intel's X25-V SSDs. The X25-V only runs a little more than $100 online, making multi-drive RAID arrays affordable enough to be tempting for desktop users. Our X25-V array was configured using Intel's P55 storage controller, the default 128KB stripe size, and the company's latest 9.6.0.1014 Rapid Storage Technology drivers.

The block-rewrite penalty inherent to SSDs and the TRIM command designed to offset it both complicate our testing somewhat, so I should explain our SSD testing methods in greater detail. Before testing the drives, each was returned to a factory-fresh state with a secure erase, which empties all the flash pages on a drive. Next, we fired up HD Tune and ran full-disk read and write speed tests. The TRIM command requires that drives have a file system in place, but since HD Tune requires an unpartitioned drive, TRIM won't be a factor in those tests.

After HD Tune, we partitioned the drives and kicked off our usual IOMeter scripts, which are now aligned to 4KB sectors. When running on a partitioned drive, IOMeter first fills it with a single file, firmly putting SSDs into a used state in which all of their flash pages have been occupied. We deleted that file before moving onto our file copy tests, after which we restored an image to each drive for some application testing. Incidentally, creating and deleting IOMeter's full-disk file and the associated partition didn't affect HD Tune transfer rates or access times.

Our methods should ensure that each SSD is tested on an even, used-state playing field. However, differences in how eagerly an SSD elects to erase trimmed flash pages could affect performance in our tests and in the real world. Testing drives in a used state may put the TRIM-less Plextor SSD at a disadvantage, but I'm not inclined to indulge the drive just because it's using a dated controller chip.

To make our massive collection of results a little easier to interpret, we've colored our bar charts by drive type. This color coding separates the SSDs from the mechanical drives and highlights the four 7,200-RPM notebook models that are the focus of this round-up.

Most of our tests run on drives connected as secondary storage, so we were able to use the Caviar Green's full 3TB with our test system's default configuration, which uses the Microsoft AHCI drivers built into Windows 7. However, as we explained in our review, the Green has issues operating at full capacity when running as a system drive, at least with current drivers and non-EFI BIOSes. Rather than moving the Green to an auxiliary storage controller that sees the Caviar's full capacity as a system drive, we'd rather stick with the motherboard's P55 chipset and live with slightly less capacity. Switching storage controllers would make the results less comparable, and the impact of running the Green at a little less than full capacity should be negligible considering that our boot and system partition only amounts to 100GB, most of which is unused.

With few exceptions, all tests were run at least three times, and we reported the median of the scores produced. We used the following system configuration for testing:

You can read more about the hardware that makes up our twin storage test systems on this page of our VelociRaptor VR200M review. Thanks to Gigabyte for providing the twins' motherboards and graphics cards, OCZ for the memory and PSUs, Western Digital for the system drives, and Thermaltake for SpinQ heatsinks that keep the Core i5s cool.